I’m super excited to share this guest post with you today! This is from my friend, Danielle Andrade. She’s mumsies to four kiddos, and a word-slayer extraordinaire. Please share and comment to encourage her!

Of all of my household chores, vacuuming the rug that sits on the floor as you first walk into my home is my favorite. It gets extremely dirty as polite people come in and wipe their feet, my children come in and kick off their boots, and some never leave the rug as they stop in quickly to pick up a child or lost item. Several times throughout the day, the build up of dirt becomes too much. I go and get my vacuum and within less than thirty seconds, it looks brand new. I set it to carpet mode, extra low, and it almost pulls me across the rug itself. It hums, no roars, with an aggression that brings me such peace. The rug looked horrible and now…  bam!  It’s the mowed lawn satisfaction in a fraction of the time.

I think that is why parenting is so hard. It is like vacuuming a rug with the hopes of seeing it cleaner in a few years. It can be hard to want to vacuum at all when you don’t see the results for such a long time but if you don’t vacuum, God help us all.  The thing is you can’t go back and vacuum that toddler dirt when it begins to really get to you at 11.  

I’m not one to buy things on sale for the next season. I know it is super smart to do so, but I’ve never wanted to spend money on something that I can’t use right away.  It is hard to vacuum a rug that won’t potentially be clean for years, if at all. You don’t know when you get them, your kid that is, if they are the type to clean up as good as new or show every speck that ever came near it. I do vacuum though because something I hate more than dirt is regret. So I lug that beast into the kitchen plug it in and get carried away because I’m not going out without a fight and a prayer for patience to see it through.